After already vamping up a storm during the WonderCon panel for Prometheus, Charlize Theron was even more feisty when she returned to the third floor ballroom at the Anaheim, Calif. convention center for Snow White and the Huntsman (out June 1). Joined by director Rupert Sanders and costar Kristen Stewart, Theron was not one to mince words when it came to talking about taking on the well-known fairy tale character of Snow White’s Evil Queen. “Everybody has an idea of her,” Theron said with a wry smile, “and there’s something nice about f—ing with that idea.”

Later, a fan pointed out that Theron had just come off one of her darkest roles in her career – as a wannabe home wrecker in Jason Reitman’s Young Adult – by way of saying that she’s “playing evil really, really well.”

Theron’s tongue-in-cheek response: “That’s because I’m a bitch….Picasso had his blue period, and this is my bitch period.” She does have a softer side, though – at one point, she genuinely flirted with a young boy asking a question, telling him he was adorable, asking if he was single, pining for him after he left the microphone.

Theron didn’t dominate the entire panel, though. To start things off, Sanders debuted a visually lush five-minute sizzle reel from the film, which showcased the rigorous action paces that Stewart’s Snow White is put through: escaping the Evil Queen’s castle by diving into the ocean, racing away on horseback, clawing through the muck and mire of the forbidden forest. “I hurt myself, a lot,” Stewart said, with a smile. “I’ve always wanted to do a f—ing bad-ass action movie.” Stewart often appeared to be a bit at a loss for words for how best to describe the character, but she did get her dander up when one questioner implied that her Snow White was a more active, bad-ass heroine in comparison with Twilight’s Bella Swan. “Hey now!” Stewart said, rising in her seat. “I could have a whole discussion about Twilight, but I won’t.” Eventually, however, Stewart did admit that Bella and Snow aren’t exactly the same person: “I love that character [of Bella], and Snow White couldn’t be much farther from it.”

Although the Huntsman of the title, Chris Hemsworth, couldn’t be at the panel, Sanders spoke highly of how “emotionally grounded” the actor was in the film, especially for someone so, you know, stacked. “[Audiences] are not expecting to cry in it,” he said, “and I think they will.”

The spectre of the other Snow White movie – director Tarsem Singh’s Mirror Mirror, with Julia Roberts and Lily Collins – came up only once during the panel, after someone asked Sanders why he hired non-little person actors to play the seven dwarfs. “Tarsem got all the little actors for his movie,” joked Sanders. He went onto explain that prior to Snow White and the Huntsman, he had hoped to make his feature directing debut with a British gangster movie that didn’t come together. So instead, he cast top British tough-guy actors like Ray Winstone, Ian McShane, Bob Hoskins, and Eddie Marsan to play Snow White’s seven dwarfs. “These are British gangsters,” he said, “but little.”